NASA TechRise Student Challenge
This nationwide contest invites students in sixth to 12th grades attending a U.S. public, private, or charter school — including those in U.S. territories — to team up with their schoolmates to design an experiment under the guidance of an educator. Teams submit ideas for experiments to fly on a NASA-sponsored commercial flight test aboard a suborbital flight vehicle. Competition winners receive $1,500 to build their payloads and no experience is necessary to join the NASA TechRise Challenge.
challenge status
2025–2026 challenge open
Flight Test Platform
High-altitude balloon and suborbital spacecraft
proposals due
November 3, 2025
Flight provider
World View Enterprises and Virgin Galactic
Developing a Nationwide Workforce | Bringing Experiments to the Launchpad | More about TechRise
Developing a Nationwide Workforce
NASA is calling on middle and high schools across the country to submit science and technology experiment ideas to its fifth TechRise Challenge. The contest seeks to equip America’s future workforce with the skills needed to advance the U.S. aerospace economy, giving students real-world experience with the same processes that professional researchers follow.
Submit by November 3, 2025Bringing Experiments to the Launchpad
2024-2025 NASA TechRise team members at Auburn Junior High
School in Auburn, Alabama, work together to practice their soldering.
Credits: Hayden KwonFlying a payload on a suborbital vehicle exposes it to various thermal, atmospheric, and spaceflight conditions, allowing researchers — and TechRise students — to collect the data they need to validate their hypotheses and advance their research.
This year, students will propose to fly their experiment on Tustin, California-based Virgin Galactic’s Suborbital-Spaceship or a high-altitude balloon operated by World View Enterprises of Tucson, Arizona. The suborbital spacecraft will provide approximately three minutes of microgravity at altitudes above 264,000 feet and accelerations three times the speed of sound (Mach 3), providing an opportunity to study the conditions of spaceflight. The high-altitude balloon will provide about four to eight hours of flight time at 70,000 to 95,000 feet with exposure to Earth’s upper atmosphere, radiation, and perspective views of Earth.
NASA will select 60 winning teams to turn their proposed experiment ideas into reality. A wide variety of resources are available to support teams through the submission process, including virtual information sessions upon request and a student virtual field trip. In addition to $1,500 to build their payload, winning teams will receive technical support and mentorship to bring their project to life.
(left) A 2024-2025 NASA TechRise Student Challenge student from Decatur High School in Decatur, Georgia, tests a sensor using the flight simulator for their team’s project studying the correlation between ground and atmospheric conditions. Credits: Cassy Smith
(right) A 2024-2025 NASA TechRise Student Challenge team member from Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical High School in Rochester, Massachusetts, tests an electrolysis apparatus for the team’s high-altitude oxygen diffusion project. Credits: Audrey Perkins
To enter the competition, teams propose their experiment idea online using the design guidelines and proposal template on the competition site. NASA expects to announce the winners in January 2026. The selected student teams build their payloads from January to May 2026, and the final experiments are scheduled to take flight in summer 2026.
Visit the competition site
“Tomorrow’s workforce lives in the bright minds of today’s students. By engaging the next generation of our workforce with hands-on learning opportunities like TechRise, we aim to give them the skills they need to take our country forward in technology, science, and space exploration.”
Danielle McCulloch, program executive, NASA’s Flight Opportunities program
More About the TechRise Student Challenge
Managed by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program at the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, and administered by Future Engineers, the TechRise Student Challenge fosters the U.S. commercial space industry through use of commercial vehicles for flight tests, while strengthening America’s space technology researcher community and enabling students across the country to engage directly with professional engineers. Flight Opportunities purchases flight testing services from its portfolio of commercial providers for the competition. TechRise is one of many NASA Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing efforts within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate offering opportunities for the public to contribute to America’s space program.
Media
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